Quote:I did notice that Member List appears to be ordered by internal ID

I just noticed we can set it by Registration Date, Post Count, User Name or Last Visit. Any preferences? It is possible to have the Main Member's List sorted by Name and hard code some links to list everyone by another method.

Quote:doesn't summarize as much information

I don't see a setting. You'll have to click on the member to see their profile to see www, AIM, etc

Quote:peeves for this forum, and it seems to be quite a bit better

Good to hear (the better search that is.

Quote:But please, please don't add a delay between searches

That's mostly in place to reduce server load. If I can set it so that members have 0 seconds between searches and unregistered have 3 secs of so, I would be happy (and server too). Well, at least we don't put up a capatcha to do searches like many forums do!
BTW, this MyBB test is set to 20 seconds between searches.

Quote:I noticed that by default it subscribes you to a thread when you reply.

The devs considered this a 'feature'. I've read that enough people complained that they will not make it default in the next version. I have issued a SQL command to turn that off. You can turn it back on. Can someone create a new user and see if new users have it turned off by default? New users shouldn't have it on by default.

Quote:otherwise a lot of emails are going to go out

Yep. We need that off for sure. Personally, I wouldn't mind haven't it completely off. Its a pain when someone's mail server goes down or whatever and I (as admin) get a ton of bounces. Speeds up the forum if it is off as well.

Quote: I wonder if it would be possible to add highlighting support for some of the most common languages people use here

VERY helpful. This is the kind of input that is great and makes the forum much better for everyone. Thanks for taking the time to check that out.

Quote:I noticed it is also set to display your age and date of birth by default.

Dang, now everyone knows I am older than SpaceWar!
That tidbit was in the user profile template. I killed it, along with setting the sex (gender) to be hidden. As for that, I would kill it once we go live. Please remind me if I forget.

Quote:I've had a look through the first 10 page

Thanks for the theme suggestions.

@zgcoder
We are using your @gmail.com email address for the live forum. Your account seems fine here. Your account is set to 'Member' so you shouldn't need to wait for your posts to get approved. PMs might be turned off for everyone except for MODs and Uber Members. I think I recall a time when spammers were using PM to hit everyone's account so we turned it off.

Quote:40 is a bit long, but reasonable given that returned 56 pages of results.

Yes, you are correct. That's why we will have to use our own theme or download a free theme when we go live. I used it simply to keep the 'shock' value of a different forum down.

Ok, and on to my further tests....

I installed phpBB. That went smoothly. I attempted to use a converter to copy users and posts into it. It failed numerous times. I tried another converter script and it too bombed out. If there is an expert with phpBB out there, and if you feel strongly about it, please contact me so I can get your help in setting up a test.

I wanted to give SMF Forum s go because it has a migration script from vBulletin. But I threw that idea aside. This forum is 'free' but not open source and their license seems to be a bit wishy washy. ... hate to do all the work of moving to find out next year 'anyone who wants to upgrade will need to pay for our commercial version.'

I wasn't able to find robust migration scripts for a few of the other forums that looked interesting and had good project teams behind them. Vanilla (at version 1) seemed to be the most interesting. More Web 2.0 like. But I don't want to wait for a stable 2.0 version of it and it wasn't clear when a vBulletin converter would be ready.

Carlos Camacho Wrote:@zgcoder
We are using your @gmail.com email address for the live forum. Your account seems fine here. Your account is set to 'Member' so you shouldn't need to wait for your posts to get approved. PMs might be turned off for everyone except for MODs and Uber Members. I think I recall a time when spammers were using PM to hit everyone's account so we turned it off.

Did you just set it to member, or does it set itself to member after 5 posts (because I could have sworn I read after 2 posts somewhere)? I'm pretty sure I was in "Nibbie" group when I made my last post. I'm guessing that spamming in PM's isn't a real issue now (considering it is difficult to get out of the nibbie group.)

Carlos Camacho Wrote:Please continue to post your thoughts and tests.

My issue with a 4 character forum username. 3 is probably a sane length too.

If we could clean it up a bit (and make it so that the home button does something other than piss people off when they try to click it) then the iPhone theme would be absolutely hilarious to have as the idg forum theme.

My thought was that the license for the theme may very well bind it to the particular forum software that we're using now, or not allow you to harvest parts from it. Without seeing a copy of the license, I don't see a way to know for sure, though. If Carlos is planning on moving us to a new theme anyway, it's not a big deal, I just thought I'd mention it.

Carlos Camacho Wrote:Yep. We need that off for sure. Personally, I wouldn't mind haven't it completely off. Its a pain when someone's mail server goes down or whatever and I (as admin) get a ton of bounces. Speeds up the forum if it is off as well.

Please don't turn the email notifications completely off...this is the only way I ever notice if there's a reply in an old topic that I've posted in.

As you can see, our I.T. director Jiminy Cricket has moved us to the new forum software. I have locked the old forum, so please update your bookmarks and links. I decided not to use the same path (URL) as the old forum sense the old forum has excellent SEO. Once the new forum's URLs have been indexed to the same level, I will completely turn off the old forum.

All posts and users were migrated over. I ran into some trouble with the migration and had to cut some fat so that the migration script would complete the transfer. All posts in the Development zone were maintained. Posts older than 90 days and in some cased older than 30 days in the Community boards were purged. Some 2 or 3 years old posts in the Assembly Room were manually deleted based on their value. (i.e. "The Mac G3 was introduced!" type of posts.) I'm sure there are further posts we could do without in the Community Zone.

As I wanted to get the new forum up and running quickly, I still have a ToDo list....

* Install our squarlies (smilies)
* Brand our theme

The staff has a private message thread that we are using to report and address any bugs, etc. Let us know if you encounter any. For example, your posts are displayed as 1 post.

I recommend that you clear your cache if using Safari.

Note that avatars can be up to 64 x 64 now.

I'm also learning the 'promotion' and 'permission' system of this forum, so you may see a bit more spam from drive-by-posters. Please report them so we can squash them like the cockroaches that they are.

Ideally, new users will need to post 5 or so legit posts or reply before they can start taking advantage of features such as the Announcements board and the new calendars. What's that? I'd like for the community to start adding events, expos, lectures and so forth to our main calendar. I also have a 'Release Calendar' created so you can announce the date of your new game. It should be interesting to see the calendar fill up with everyone's upcoming titles...

I've also been thinking of a site refresh (style and new content) as well. And fingers crossed, uploading game assets, as well as creating new ones. Somewhere in there, uDevGames will be remade. If this new forum software turns out to be a good move, I'd like to migrate iDevApps to it as well.

I know you've been working hard getting this thing going Carlos, so congratulations!

I don't know if it's still a problem but just in case others still can't login with Safari, I had to clear cookies for iDevGames before it'd let me login while we were doing testing. Otherwise, Firefox worked for me until we got that figured out.

That didn't happen to me. I saw OSC's comment in the Solaro devlog thread. Don't let it stress you out too much. "Stuff" happens.

[adding] speaking of "stuff" happening, I just spent the entire morning chasing down a bug in OpenFeint which was actually caused by their server database being down. We got folks buying our software and sending emails about how it doesn't work, and there ain't a darn thing I can do about it right now. Gotta laugh things off sometimes because "stuff" really does just happen and often when you least expect it to.